


sleep on the floor, dream about me

by Waypaststrange (moonbeatblues)



Series: full of field and stars, you carried all of time [3]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, but it is no longer, i don’t like just having self-deprecating chloe but, it’s how she would feel, more of god rachel and oracle max, this started out as inspired by gemini by the alabama shakes, we’ll move on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:57:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13979532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/Waypaststrange
Summary: chloe waits and dreams in changes, but they can still stick in the throat





	sleep on the floor, dream about me

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably about as linear as this series will get, honestly
> 
> title is from anthems for a seventeen year old by broken social scene

You’re not used to being good for someone.

Not that you really believe it, even now— but it’s harder to imagine Max lying to you. She watches you with the kind of reverence usually reserved for eclipses and cryptid sightings, even though you don’t _do_ anything.   
You smoke shitty weed— fuckin’ Vortex Club kids— and you brew coffee for Max, steal some before you remember you _hate_ coffee. You play a lot more of The Smiths these days— softening up— and you don’t wear shirts in the house. And always, she looks at you all wide-eyed, like a rabbit, takes pictures of you when you’re not looking and laughs when you vault over for the developing Polaroids she’s waving out of your reach, breathes heavy into your collarbone and pushes your hair out of your face to kiss you when you’re over her, photos shucked to the floor.

It’s hard not to feel like you’re corrupting her, like you’re bleeding ink into her skin in the tumble of the wash. It keeps you up and late and gasping, digging the heels of your palms into your eyes and getting up so you don’t wake Max with your shaking, because it should not fucking _be_ that you’re allowed to do this— someone should stop you from swapping all the quiet, rotten parts of yourself in with the osmosis. She’s frail and so small you could crush her, strong in the way of purity that you do nothing but disintegrate.  
She cried when she ripped that photograph. It hurt her, it made her catatonic to choose you. This isn’t supposed to be for people like you. Cities don’t burn for punk rats, and for good fucking reason.

You’re ng-ka-py, dark pulls of rotten apples, the ichor of flawed things. You’re a fucking tar pit, opaque and heaving and dragging down anyone who takes that first step.

  
Max is fuckin’ smart, though, way smarter than you. She always wakes up before you drag yourself down too far, hair a fuzzy halo in the dark.   
She never goes to you, just rolls and looks down the twisted blankets at you.   
She asks you to come back, because you need a reminder that she wants you here, because you’d do anything for Max, because she knows you will.

  
On good days, you feel primordial. On good nights, good ungodly hours of the morning, you don’t open your eyes when you wake up so you can imagine the two of you curled up far beneath the earth or like the star-child in A Space Odyssey, warm and oblivious and deep in centuries of dreams, loose in sleep and tangled limbs.   
You used to sleep with at least five pillows, liked to burrow deep and convince yourself you’d never emerge. You were never really afraid of the dark, not like Max— she used to sleep over all the time, so you stuck two packages’ worth of those glow in the dark stars on your ceiling (and fell off your bed three times in the process) for her. You had to sleep with your face shoved further in your pillows, but it was worth it to see her tipping her face up to them quietly, mouth open just so.

In retrospect, you think that Max didn’t like the dark, didn’t like sleep because she just wanted to keep _going_ , was afraid she’d miss something if she closed her eyes. You, though, you always liked to think you’d wake up as something else.

These days, Max sleeps with the weight of other lives in her bones, clutches her right hand to her chest with the other like she can’t even trust herself in sleep to stay. You’re used to getting up earlier, but she’s a lot less shaky if she gets to pretend to wake you up; Max takes solace in you as a force of loose limbs and afternoon naps and yawns that make your jaw click, so you live in it.   
—

She tells you about Rachel, eventually, and it sends you heaving into the shower until your skin is all the same bleary, washed-out red.   
She’s sitting just outside the bathroom door when you emerge.

You cross your legs, shakily, to sit across from her in the doorframe. Your hair creates puddles on the tile, and you don’t speak for a long while. There’s simultaneously too much to say for a single language and not enough to fill a sentence.  
Max watches you brood for several minutes. She tries to apologize, but you wave listlessly in her direction.   
Rain lashes the windows.

  
“Does she still think about me?”  
Your voice husks in tandem with the energy draining from your bones.

Max exhales slowly.   
“All the time.”  
—

You think Max is ascending onto another plane.  
It’s welling up that same tar in your throat— you have only ever fallen for immortals.   
Kate’s god— hell-emptying as he may be— sends you angels in the way of Hades, water in the desert, carried in leaking baskets. Just as you tip your head back, the last of it is lost to the sand. No reprieve, but the hope is enough to keep you near the well.

Max tells you she won’t leave and you believe her, but you believed Rachel, too. Unstoppable force versus immovable object.   
It all rolls over in the same colorless wave, the same silent apathy, that there really is nothing. Rachel was never yours, and she inhaled dragon fire and curled up around the searing in her ribs to die and sink to the earth. Max, if she ever was yours, is no longer, smoke curling in her lungs like her blood carries carcinogens. You are ash, you are low and compacted to dust and scattered by the wind to the sea. Far, and falling farther.

Max, vessel for a language you will never speak and that she cannot translate, is silent. Your hair dries into thin blue strands.

But when she asks, you follow.  
—

You should clean your flatbed.  
You’re cross legged on a thin blanket spread over the mess, watching Max. She closes her eyes as though in prayer— there is no way you will ever understand this dynamic.

She stands for a moment and balks in your direction before beelining for the passenger door. “Just wait a minute,” she calls back to you, and you do.

You wait, with the smell of ozone gathering in the air and the breeze stirring the trees into a slow, rustling pulse. You wait, and clouds crowd above.   
You wait, and you cry like the energy of the storm is borne into you all at once when you see it.

The doe approaches you with the hesitancy of Rachel Amber— that is to say, none— and your tears blot dark patches on the blanket.   
It bumps its muzzle against your cheek with a thin, whining buzz in its throat, and you cradle its head.

When you fold its ears back with shaking, smoothing thumbs, you see the feather. The same unworldly blue as your hair, frayed and at an odd angle.

The doe licks at the tears gathering at the corner of your mouth— _cleaning you_ , you think— and the sky cracks open.

**Author's Note:**

> @seafleece on tumblr for yelling, @quetzalcoatlmundi for writing
> 
> suggestions for different timelines to examine appreciated! i have some plans but. i’m always willing to derail


End file.
